Essays on trans, intersex, cis and other persons and topics from a trans perspective.......All human life is here.

This site is the most comprehensive on the web devoted to trans history and biography. Well over 1400 persons worthy of note, both famous and obscure, are discussed in detail, and many more are mentioned in passing.)

There is a detailedIndexarranged by vocation, doctor, activist group etc.

In addition to this most articles have one or more labels at the bottom. Click one to go to similar persons. There is a full list of labels at the bottom of the page. There is also a search box at the top left. Enjoy exploring!

++ At the London pride March, trans women where denied the use of women's toilets, and were told incorrectly that they had to produce their Gender Recognition Certificates.

++ A court in Karlsruhe ruled that a trans woman who transitioned after being married to a woman for 50 years could both remain married and change her legal gender.

++ The Irish High Court ruled that Irish Law was incompatible with Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights with respect to Lydia Foy's attempt to get her birtt certificate changed.

Uganda High Court ruled in favour of GLBT activists (including Victor Mukasa) and against the Attorney General.

UN statement on universal rights of GLBT persons. The participating countries urged all nations to "promote and protect human rights of all persons, regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity," and to end all criminal penalties against people because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. This was conceived by Louis Tin, the founder of the International Day Against Homophobia (IDAHO), and adopted by France during its rotating presidency of the European Union. 66 countries including all EU countries (including Poland, Latvia and Lithuania) and several African countries signed. Notable among the non-signers were South Africa and Turkey, and, as expected, the US. Opposition came from the Vatican and the Islamic Conference.

China re-introduces optional sex testing at the Olympics.

National Fatwa Council of Malaysia issued a fatwa saying that tomboyism, where a girl behaves or dresses in what is seen as a boyish manner, is forbidden by Islam.

From a small town in Kentucky, Terry won a Halloween contest in 1958, and sent the photographs to The Jewel Box Revue and was hired as a performer. From 1960 she worked at Club 82 in New York City, where she dated actor Jim Hutton.

She took female hormones for only 18 months, starting in 1961. She was on the cover of Female Mimicsin 1963.

She had been scheduled to have genital surgery at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn in 1964, but the surgeon felt wrong and she cancelled. She did have the operation the next year with Dr Trowbridge in Illinois. Her mother took the surgeon’s and psychiatrist’s letters to the county clerk and got Terry’s birth certificate re-issued. However there were complication with her bladder that continued until she had extra surgery in Yonkers.

She continued at the Club 82 until she found an office job as a typist. In 1969 she moved to Virginia Beach, Virginia, where she married a US naval officer, and was with him and his son for 14 years without either knowing her past.

After divorce she retrained as a computer programmer/ analyst, and then worked for the US federal government.

29 December 2008

David was adopted by a couple in pub and hotel management. He trained as a master grocer. He married a woman at the age of 19, and at 21 was manager of the Norwich Co-op. At 29 he was assistant manager at Selfridges food hall in London, when he realized that he was really gay.

He got up and sang at the Cricketers pub in Battersea, and found that he had a natural talent. With James Court he won a talent competition and they became The Trollettes, David adopting the name Maisie Trollette, and James as Jimmy Trollette. They appeared regularly at the Union Tavern in Camberwell.

David was the first to revive own-voice singing in drag acts. He was in the London stage version of Boys in the Band, and has also played dames in pantomimes many times, especially Widow Twanky and The Ugly Sisters. He won £12,000 on the football pools and bought a hotel in Brighton which he ran with his boyfriend for 18 years.

He has a successful one-man show, and has played around the world. He was a founder member of Brighton Cares, the HIV charity.

Although he never went to Pattaya, Thailand, until 2003, he has become enthusiastic and now visits there at least twice a year.

James (Jimmy Trollette) has also done dame parts, especially the Ugly Sisters with David, and likewise has done lots of charity work.

27 December 2008

Ben graduated from Harvard Law School in 1985. He founded a US-wide legal program to combat Aids-related discrimination, and was executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association. He wrote position papers for then US presidential candidate Bill Clinton.

Irwin graduated in law from the University of Chicago. He was director of the Aids Legal Referral Panel of the San Francisco Bay Area. He authored Chicago’s gay rights ordinance, which was passed in 1980 and is still in effect.

In 1993 Schatz, Keller and others attended a Bette Midler concert in San Francisco dressed as the Andrews Sisters. They were offered engagements, and even discovered that they all could sing.

Ben let his Rachel persona evolve, and the group became The Kinsey Sicks. After a few years of a double life Ben quit his law jobs and became a full time drag performer. Irwin followed in 2002 to become Winnie.

24 December 2008

Born in Islamabad, Ali is the son of a now-retired colonel in the Pakistani army, and a government official.

Saleem describes himself as ‘a woman in a man’s body’, who fantasized about growing up to be a woman since he was a child.

He built a reputation impersonating former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Diane Spencer, Princess of Wales and actress/singer Noor Jehan. Bhutto herself asked Ali to do his impersonation of her and burst out laughing.

He has now become famous as Begum Nawazish Ali, a flirtatious widow on The Late Night Show on Aaj TV, where she poses taboo questions, that journalists regularly avoid, to imans, celebrities and politicians. Pakistan’s military government has threatened to ban the program.

22 December 2008

He moved to San Francisco, took the name Pussy Katt, lied about his age and started work as a female impersonator at Finocchio’s.

There was a rumor that Errol Flynn, David Niven and two others had taken Pussy Katt and friends back to a hotel suite at the Fairmont for a night of ‘debauchery’. Gossip columnist Louella Parsons heard this, but couldn’t use it.

Howard Hughes, who had first met Katt when he escorted Ava Gardner to Finocchio’s, returned for another meeting, and then he invited her to his suite at the Fairmont. Hughes had read a book that claimed that ancient Egyptian eunuchs were regarded as better sex objects after castration. In 1945, Hughes flew with Katt to Mexico City where she was castrated and was paid $50,000.

Afterwards he installed her in a villa in the new resort of Acapulco, and repeatedly visited her for almost two years. When he grew bored with her, he gave her enough money to open a local drag club, which flourished for three years before the police closed it down with charges of drugs and prostitution.

There is no mention of Steve Clayton/Pussy Katt in Joanne Meyerowitz' How Sex Changed. However she is obviously one of the very early sex changes, 7 years before Christine Jorgensen. Her operation is simply described as a castration, and therefore did not include vaginoplasty. So that is practically the same as Jorgensen had from Dr Hamburger in Copenhagen, except for hormones. One wonders if Katt later did have vaginoplasty and take hormones as they became available in the next decade.

So Katt was 16 when she had her operation. The Gender Clinics that sprang up in later decades would have rejected her on this ground alone.

Katt has certainly kept her head down as regards media exposure. I cannot find anything about her except in Porter's book.

There was nothing about any drag queens or transsexuals in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, 2004, with Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes.

++ revised 24/01/11 to incorporate more sources, and to resort the facts chronologically.

Dailey was born and raised in New York City. He appeared in a minstrel show, and then in vaudeville before his first Broadway show in 1937. He was signed by MGM in 1940.

He served in the US Signal Corps during the Second World War and was discharged as a Captain.

In 1946 he was taking Linda Darnell's dresses from the Fox wardrobe department. Howard Hughes made him return them, but gave him a gift certificate for $5,000 at a leading department store.

He was teamed with Betty Grable in Mother Wore Tights, 1947. He was nominated for an Oscar for his performance in When My Baby Smiles at Me, 1948 – also with Grable. It is said that she also lent him some of her screen wardrobe - the best couture that Hollywood had to offer. Dan became one of the top male leads at Twentieth Century Fox in the early 1950s.

He married his fourth wife, Gwen Carter, in February 1955. In June Inside magazine wrote that "After every binge he shows up around the film colony, decked from head to toe in outlandish female attire". In September that year Uncensored ran an article dispelling the rumors that he was a transvestite (which was a way of repeating the stories without being sued).

In January 1957 Confidential ran "The Night Dan Dailey was Dolly Dawn" claiming that he had danced in a pink tulle dress in a New York gay bar the previous March. Betty tried to save Dailey's career by pointing to his wife and family, but his film career was essentially over by that point, although he continued in television into the 1970s.

In 1976, actress cum gossip columnist Joyce Haber was on television promoting her novel about Hollywood, The Users. Asked to dish some gossip, she mentioned that one of the top dancer-actors was a closet transvestite with a costly and beautiful wardrobe that many women would envy.

After the suicide of his only son (from his third marriage), he was an embittered alcoholic. He died three years later, just after he had played boyfriend Clyde Tolson in The Private Files of J.Edgar Hoover, 1977. He appeared in over 60 films.

21 December 2008

She played male characters all over the US, from Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls with the Provincetown Players to all the male roles in Medea, Macbeth and A Comedy of Errors with Dan Savage-led theatre company Greek Active in Seattle. She also played the matron in Women Behind Bars. In New York Pearlman was a member of WOW Theater, playing the memorable role of Sandy Sonnenshein, the dyke Card Sharp in Lynn Hayes' Guitar Boy.

She was one of the Jew Girls in the jazz- performance-art-comedy group Sister Theresa and the All Jew Girl Band. As a lead singer and bass player she fronted such bands as the reggae/ska Small Axe, wave/punk bands Skinny Wires and Jezebel's Kiss.

In 1994 she created and directed an all-girl Romeo and Juliet, set in the modern day Seattle snakepit of rival women's softball teams.

She adapted and directed an oddly gendered and award-winning version of the Douglas Sirk/Ross Hunter/Lana Turner movie Madame X; and a surrealist The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Lawrence Welk; and a series of fantasy/nightmare performances for the fetish balls of Seattle.

At age 30 he transitioned to male, and directed the female-to-male comedy short, Unhung Heroes, 2002. He is currently located in London.

As most of you know, a film biography of James Barry the 19th century trans man doctor is currently being made. Why have they cast a cisgendered woman in the part when a trans man with as much acting experience as Lazlo is available? I suspect very much that the film will deny that Barry was a trans man, and will pretend that he was a woman in disguise.

20 December 2008

Méi Lán (male name) was born into a family of Beijing Opera performers. He made his debut at age 10 at the Guanghe Theatre.

He acted for 50 years and almost exclusively played the qingyi role, a type of the dan role, that is he played female parts. He is generally known as Méi Lánfāng (a female name). His style became renowned as the ‘Mei school’.

He was the first Beijing opera star to tour abroad and took his art to Japan and the United States. He was welcomed to Hollywood by Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. In the Soviet Union he was filmed by Sergei Eisenstein.

With the Japanese invasion in 1937, Méi moved to Hong Kong. He later returned to Shanghai, but grew a beard and moustache and refused to perform until 1946. In 1948 he appeared in Sheng si hen, China's first colour film.

After the Communist takeover he was director of China Beijing Opera Theatre and the Chinese Opera Research Institute, and was elected a deputy to the National People’s Congress.

He died of a heart attack.

Méi is the subject of a star-studded new biographical film by Mei-Juin Chen.

Ella Wesner started in showbiz as a ballet girl. She was Annie Hindle's dresser for a while which enabled her to learn the tricks of male impersonation.

She was very popular in the 1880s. Like Hindle she recycled British Music Hall material for American audiences. Her best remembered act was as a tipsy dude getting a shave. Some found her act rather coarse or dubious, but this contributed to its masculinity.

She never married and seems to have preferred female lovers. Her only reported romance was with Josie Mansfield, the notorious mistress of crooked financier Jim Fisk. After Fisk was shot by another of Josie's lovers, Edward Stokes, Ella and Josie went to Paris and presided over a salon at the Café Américan.

15 December 2008

Sociologist David Riddell, married and with a daughter, was a lecturer at the University of Lancaster, when he co-authored Approaching Sociology: A Critical Introduction, 1970, a work inspired by humanist Marxism, symbolic interactionism, phenomenological sociology and ethno-methodology. This work inspired the then undergraduate Richard Ekins who later wrote on the sociology of trans persons.

David completed transition to Carol with surgery from Dr Georges Burou in Casablanca in 1972. She was in the clinic there the same time as Jan Morris. The revised edition of Approaching Sociology in 1972 names the co-author as Carol S. Riddell.

Also in 1972, she presented a paper to the National Deviancy Conference 10 on “Transvestism and the Tyranny of Gender” in which she analyses the two-gender system as a feature of capitalism – which was an early influence on sociologist Dave King who also later wrote on the sociology of trans persons.

In 1980 Carol wrote a critical pamphlet reviewing Janice Raymond’s 'The Transsexual Empire' criticizing its factual errors, its betrayal of feminist ideals and its use of masculinist ideas. This was well received and much reprinted.

In 1985 she became a devotee of Sai Baba and the Findhorn Foundation, and her later work is devoted to the sect and to the Hebrides where it is located.

Malaysian Zhong Xuan Tai, who used the English name Jeffrey Chung, studied in Canada, USA, China, Singapore as well as Malaysia. He qualified as an American Naturopathic Doctor, and as a Chinese Medical Doctor. He did an M.Sc. in at the University of Health Science in Hawaii.

Chung completed her transition to Jie Xi/Jessie in 2003. She had met her boyfriend Joshua Beh Soo Kiang, an accountant, four years earlier. He proposed to her six times, the last time in blood, before she accepted – as she was afraid that she would ruin his life.

However Malaysia does not permit the reissue of identity papers for post-operative transsexuals, and her identity card and passport say ‘male’.

She and Joshua were married in a big ceremony in 2005 at a hotel in Sarawak state on Borneo Island, Their parents gave their blessing, and the ceremony was blessed by the Charismatic Church, but the marriage will not be recognized by the state. The National Evangelical Christian Fellowship, which represents more than 2,000 churches in Malaysia, also said it would not recognize the marriage.

Jie Xi operates a health therapy business in Kuala Lumpur. She is also a singer.

12 December 2008

Molinier, the son of a house painter, lived most of his life in Bordeaux, France.

As early as sixteen his sisters took him to a ball dressed as a girl. At age 18, when his sister died, he allegedly had sex with her corpse when left alone to photograph it.

Many of his paintings were of erotic images featuring sphinxes, sirens and chimeras.

In his late fifties he became involved with the Surrealists. In his sixties, he turned to erotic photographs, often featuring himself as female, that focused especially on images of black stockings. He was primarily a leg fetishist; the gender of the body connected to the leg did not matter as long as the leg was blackstockinged and hairless. He attached great importance to satisfying himself anally with dildos, which he referred to as 'godmiches', made from silk stockings in a condom. This was more important to him than regular intercourse. He associated the godmiches as closely as possible with high heels, as part of making them into feminine phalluses. The problem with a natural penis attached to a man was that it lacks ambivalence and therefore it cannot play any female part in his psychological projection as a transvestite. The implicit auto-sexualism of all this came to its acme in that Molinier has the body subtlety of being able to do auto-fellatio.

In 1967 he met Hanel Koeck, a German sadomasochist who was a leg and shoe fetishist. She became the model in many of his paintings and photomontages. Jean-Pierre Bouyxou made a film Satan bouche un coin, 1968 which included Molinier in drag. In 1975 he photographed the Swiss painter Luciano Castelli in drag. The next year he photographed Thierry Agullo, a Bordeau painter, also in drag.

Rahila Khan had six of her stories about Asian girls and white boys in England broadcast on the BBC in 1986 and then published by Virago. The five stories about white boys were in the first person, while the seven about Muslim girls are in the third. There was no problem with Rahila writing about white boys in the first person.

When it came out that Rahila was the Reverend Toby Forward (1950 - ), there was a brouhaha, and Virago pulped all remaining copies.

Rev Forward has since been installed as canon residentiary and preceptor of Liverpool Cathedral, and has become an established children’s author under his own name.

Born and raised in Ghent, Belgium, Van Durme studied Dramatic Arts at the Ghent Conservatory, and worked as an actor.

Vanessa transitioned in the 1970s with surgery from Dr Georges Burou in Casablanca in 1975.

In the 1990s, she wrote plays and television scripts, especially for VRT, the Flemish public channel for which she directed Liefde Geluk (Love and Chance). She also did comedy on the radio. She returned to acting in the role of Tosca in Allemaal Indiaan (all Indians) at the Avignon Festival in 1999.

06 December 2008

In 1924, dressed as female, he went to Cakewalkswith a buddy and they won first prize as the best couple. Friends told him that he was as good as the professional female impersonators.

He started with bookings in the Pittsburgh area, and then joined a touring group, Shufflin Sam. For six years from 1927 he played in and around Atlantic City, often as the only colored member of the troupe.

From the mid-1930s he was based in New York City, appearing in Greenwich Village and Harlem.

In 1944 he played Montréal for four months, and in 1948 he was promoting boat rides on the Hudson River.

He put on the Funmaker drag balls, where anyone who cared to could be in drag, from the mid 1940s until his death, that became the standard for the later voguing balls. His show was both a song and dance routine.

05 December 2008

Lothar Berfelde was born in Berlin-Mahlsdorf. When a young boy, his grand-uncle said that Lothar should have been a girl living at the previous turn of the century, while a transvestite lesbian aunt allowed young Lothar to roam around her Prussian farmhouse in girl's attire.

During the Second World War he helped a second-hand dealer clear out apartments of deported Jews, and sometimes kept items for himself.

His father was the local Nazi leader, and in 1942 Lothar had to join the Hitler Youth. When his parents split in 1944, the father pulled a gun on his son. Lothar killed him with a rolling pin while he slept. After several week in a psychiatric institution, he was sentenced to four years in a juvenile prison, but was released with the fall of the Nazi regime.

In the new German Democratic Republic, he worked as a second-hand dealer, and often dressed as female, and became known as Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. She collected from the bombed-out houses, and also from homes abandoned by those who fled to West Berlin.

Her collection evolved into the Gründerzeit Museum. She became involved in the preservation of the Mahlsdorf estate in 1958 , and later was awarded the manor house, rent free. From 1974-6 the state tried to bring the museum and its exhibits under state control. Charlotte fought this by giving away the exhibits to visitors, and perhaps by becoming a Statsi informer, but was allowed to keep the museum.

After the union of the two Germanies, her museum was attacked in 1992 by neo-Nazis, and several people were hurt. This was the same year that Rosa von Praunheim made a film about her life. In 1993 she was awarded a Bundesverdienst-kreuz medal.

In 1997 she moved to Sweden and set up a similar museum in Porla Brunn. The City of Berlin bought the Gründerzeit Museum.

She died of heart failure while on a visit to Berlin. A memorial has been erected to her, but at the insistence of her relatives, it is dedicated to ‘Lothar Berfelde’ and uses male declensions.

The German word 'frau' can be translated into English as either 'woman' or 'wife'.

In Nazi Germany the sentence for a teenager killing his own father was only four years. That is a surprise.

Of course the real achievement is an out trans person being able to run her own museum in East Germany. I cannot think of any equivalent achievement by a trans person in the Nato countries before 1990.

02 December 2008

William Orobko was a lawyer, an entrepreneur and a television host. He was married to a woman and they had three children and a large house in West Vancouver. He had been an active nudist in the 1960s. He was also a bibliographer (he wrote a bibliography of the novels of C.S. Foster).

He gave up the law after a heart attack at age 32, and wrote a book on commuter cycling in Calgary. He also wrote a book on the law for musicians.

In 1995 he went to Thailand and became involved in a dubious $1million financial transaction with two Americans who turned out to have forged documents. All three were arrested. William was repeatedly raped by the guards in a Bangkok prison. Even after release on bail, the Thai authorities held on to his passport, and he could not return to Canada until Preston Manning, the leader of the Canadian Reform Party, went to Thailand and took up his case. He was for a while a fugitive from Thailand.

On return to Canada, he sought psychological counselling, and decided to become a woman. He says that he was not a crossdresser before this point.

He temporarily lived in Kelowna, and became a patient at the Vancouver Clinic. William transitioned to Willow. She was able to get permanent disability welfare for post-traumatic stress resulting from Michael Bailey, and is antagonistic to Andrea James, Lynn Conway, and Deirdre McCloskey. She and her new female partner now live in Prince George in northern British Columbia.
the incarceration on top of her earlier health problems. She has become a major apologist for

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About Zagria

I have a social science degree. I spent several years in the 70s doing Gay Lib counselling, and moved on to organizing trans groups. I was rejected by the Clarke Institute (now CAMH) in the mid 1980s, probably because I do not match either of their stereotypes, but was accepted by Russel Reid on our first meeting in late 1987, and had surgery from James Dalrymple some months later. I have mainly worked as an IT consultant. I have been with the same husband for 45 years.